Conversations For Transformation

Essays By Laurence Platt

Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

And More

June 14, 2015

"Lots of people have talked about taking that
step
into the unknown. Taking that
step
into the unknown is actually a lot less courageous than taking a
stepfrom the unknown."

...

"In terms of Star Trek, the Gene Roddenberry sci-fi TV series,
the
ordinary
mission is 'to boldly go where no man has gone before'. For me,
there's at least some boldness in that. But the
extraordinary
use of 'boldly' which really turns me on is 'to boldly come
from where no man has come from before'".

... Laurence Platt

"If I have seen further, it is by
standing
on the shoulders of giants."

I've never wanted to be
better
than anyone. For that matter, I've never wanted to be
anyone else either ... except me. In my younger years, what I did want
was to be
better
than myself (by "younger years" I mean until halfway through my twenty
eighth year). Wanting to be
better
than myself was what I considered to be what you did in life. It was a
way to be "more me" ie a way to be what I now distinguish as "being
authentic".
What I didn't get at the time was that wanting to be
better
than myself, is an impediment to being truly great. Getting that, would
come later - much later.

The notion I had that being more me, would be
better
than the way I was being, should be spoken with
rigor:
being more me, it could be restated, was not being
better
than "the way" I was being but rather it was being
better
then "who" I was being. That particular
languaging
would also only come much later. Included in my notion was that all
people wanted to be
better
than the way they were being. I just assumed it. I never actually asked
anyone if they did. So I didn't really know if it was true or not. I
assumed becoming
better
than I was, was the smart thing to do for me, and so I assumed everyone
else also wanted that for themselves.

Then I made a pivotal discovery at twenty eight and a half years old.
In a burst of pure
Zen* which
punctured and fractured my belief system in a way it hadn't been
punctured or fractured before, I discovered the entire notion of
"becoming
better"
is fundamentally flawed.
How
so? This is
how:
we're each already perfect and whole and
complete,
exactly the way we are and exactly the way we aren't. So the notion of
that which is already perfect becoming better, is fundamentally
flawed - QED.

That's something to be experienced, by the way. It doesn't occur
with any validity in the realm of wishful thinking. Neither is it
putting a so-called positive spin on things. It's that
there's no "getting
better"
-
how
can anyone get
better
than the perfect they already are? "Oh, but I'm not
perfect", you say? Well ... I invite you to start
standing
in the possibility that you really are. And so that we have a
common
frame of reference, this is what it is to be perfect: being perfect is
being exactly the way you are and exactly the way you aren't. And
clearly you are exactly the way you are and exactly the
way you aren't, yes? So you're perfect. Stop lying about it.

Paradoxically
we're at our best, the very best we can possibly be, when we give up
the notion of becoming
better,
and simply be the way we are. The way we are is the best it gets.
Really it is. Honest! It may take a while to get that. But it only
takes a while to get it because we dither with it for so long without
committing
to it. Yet getting it, actually happens in an instant, once you stop
dithering with it and
commit
to it. And when you do get it ... Wow! Things suddenly go very
quiet
fast.

What gets in the way for people in getting that the way we are is the
best it gets, is it may sound like there's a certain
fixedness, a certain stuckness, a certain stasis if you
will, in "the way we are". But the thing is "the way we are"
doesn't equate to fixedness or stuckness or stasis. "The way we are",
to the contrary upon
close
examination, is pure
opening,
pure
creativity,
pure possibility. In this sense, "the way we are" is enough, it's
whole, it's
complete,
and it's the best it gets.

This sense of being enough is the sense which I, in my younger years,
once wanted to get
better
with. I wanted to be better than me. But I've never wanted to be
better
than anyone else. Although there's a lot of being competitive in
our world
(so much so that's it's almost impossible to consider what we would
look like without it), there's
nothing
competitive required to be
human
for me. I am me and you are you. So we've already won. It's what we do
next
from win that'll define
our legacy.